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Comment by function_seven | Hacker News Reader

This burns me up:

> These 118 con men and women were posing as contractors & preying on innocent homeowners in Hillsborough County, who were just looking to repair or improve their home," said Hillsborough County Sheriff Chad Chronister

I am almost certain that's not what happened. Unless they each lied about having a contractors' license when asked, they didn't "pose" as anything, and aren't conning anyone.

Based on the examples in this article, is there anything that doesn't require a license to do? Unhooking a toilet is apparently an advanced skill in Florida.

I guess this is my reminder to give some more to www.ij.org

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>> These 118 con men and women were posing as contractors & preying on innocent homeowners

> I am almost certain that's not what happened.

Right you are:

"When the handyman says no, then the undercover detective moves the conversation to something else and then comes back to the question later in a different way," says Sammis. "By the time the handyman gets to the location, they want to make the homeowner happy and end up agreeing to perform work that they didn't intend on doing when they first arrived. The undercover detective[s] are just creating a crime that probably wouldn't occur otherwise."

> The undercover detective[s] are just creating a crime that probably wouldn't occur otherwise.

Isn't that the definition of entrapment?

Not quite, it's causing someone to commit a crime they wouldn't ordinarily commit, so it all depends how pushy they were about it. If you could argue they coerced the contractors into doing the work, that's entrapment. But inviting them over under false pretenses and then simply asking them to commit a crime, while of questionable value to the community, isn't entrapment.

a few illustrated examples of what does and does not qualify as entrapment:

https://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=633

No. There's some sort of legal sophistry that helps them get away with it, and even if there weren't there's always the fall back of qualified immunity.

Entrapment is a defense not an offense, thus immunities on the part of the putative entrapper are immaterial.

> Unhooking a toilet is apparently an advanced skill in Florida.

I am a former licensed master plumber, and I still hold a license to work as a plumber so I just want to weigh in here. I would never, Not Ever drink the water in Any industrial or commercial complex. Period. The reason is because although it is not technically difficult to "unhook a toliet" as you say it is even easier (especially now with the advent of Home Depot and Amazon selling all manner of "plumbing contraptions") to inadverntly create a potential cross conection. Here is the reason I do not drink the water (or or soda or soup or anything that uses their water supply): when I was a plumbing contractor one of my accounts was a wire and plating facility that made a lot of different automotive fasteners and what not (pretty cool mavhines btw), one day I walked into the plating room And I was Horrifired to see washing machine hoses attached to spigots literally laying in the plating solutions that contained Cyanide... no vacuum breakers no RPZ's (reduced pressure zone devices) nothing to protect the water supply from siphoning Cyanide back into it. Fuck that noise--never since have I drank the water, nor never will I again. And I have seen coutless cross connections since then in all manner of facilities.

Not to mention not having a clue about proper material and methods while working on on natural gas or LPG sytems and so on, and so on. You can do a lot of damage really really fast if you're clueless.

What about unhooking a toilet? Or installing a new kitchen faucet? Filling gasoline into your car is extremely dangerous too, which is why in Oregon and New Jersey trained professionals are the only ones allowed to perform the task.

>trained professionals

Ha ha! Wait, you are joking right? I live in Oregon and they are about as trained professionals as the teenager working at McDonalds is a trained Michelin chef.

Yes, they're using sarcasm to ridicule their parent comment's claim that someone hired to just unhook a toilet should legally NEED to be a licensed plumber, by comparing it to similarly low-skill tasks "needing" to be highly trained in case something goes wrong.

I'm not following; you want separate plumbing lines entirely to feed sinks, outlets and toilets? I can't picture a single residential facility that doesn't have a shared feed, nevermind a corporate complex designed for efficiency.

>no vacuum breakers no RPZ's (reduced pressure zone devices) nothing to protect the water supply from siphoning Cyanide back into it

Not even the shutoff valve? There should be constant pressure behind the hose beyond it.

You need an anti-siphon design, of some sort.

Direct hose connections can result in back-contamination. A drop-fill won't do that. There are anti-siphon designs, they are less assured as they may still fail.

https://www.thespruce.com/anti-siphon-faucet-1824942

I don't understand. They had a machine for washing parts where the water intake for the machine was pulling from an open container with the plating solution? How does this contaminate the building's water?

I think it's the case where the water supply (out of the wall) had an open hose that dropped down into a basin and at the bottom, made physical contact with a resting pool of cyanide-containing fluid.

Capillary action could possibly induce the cyanide fluid up into the hose, and/or backwash/turbulence could mix fluids inside the hose, and in just the wrong conditions, could result in some cyanide back-flowing up to the piping, to be distributed elsewhere in the building. As an extreme layman, I'd assess that as unlikely but at least possible.

>The reason is because although it is not technically difficult to "unhook a toliet" as you say it is even easier (especially now with the advent of Home Depot and Amazon selling all manner of "plumbing contraptions") to inadverntly create a potential cross conection.

Please tell us how one can screw up hooking up a toilet so badly as to create a cross connection. It's not easy to confuse a 3" or better closet flange with a 3/8" compression fitting, and it would be pretty obvious to anyone who tried it.

> Please tell us how one can screw up hooking up a toilet so badly as to create a cross connection

Sure: unless you understand potable water and drainage systems, proper appurtenances, proper methods and materials I don't want you touching my drinking water supply. It's the same reason you don't want me typing random characters into your code. I'm not a coder, you're not a plumber.

And to be clear I used domestic water as an example, you could just as easily mess up the sanitary connection and have raw sewage seeping into the building.

It takes 8 years of working experience before you are even allowed to take a Master Plumbing test... and we aren't stupid people. There is A lot know.

So, no then.

>It takes 8 years of working experience before you are even allowed to take a Master Plumbing test... and we aren't stupid people. There is A lot know.

Never said plumbers were stupid. But we're talking about replacing an existing fixture with a functionally identical replacement. If you try to tell me that needs a licensed Master plumber, I'll know exactly what your motives are.

> Based on the examples in this article, is there anything that doesn't require a license to do?

Ironically, software development.

I mean, it's not like planes are falling out of the sky, we don't need standards and licenses.

Planes do have standards

That's the joke. (Made more obvious by the fact that the 737 MAX controversy was over a software issue.)

The MAX is a system design issue... for reliability it should probably include at least a third AoA sensor.

No, it's not a joke.

If Aviation didn't have a lot of standards, considerably more planes would be falling out of the sky.

Not just a software issue in this case but a combination of software and non-redundant hardware in the default configuration with a single angle-of-attack sensor on each side. That missing sensor is far more likely to be related to bean counters than to software developers. Are bean counters licenced?

Do you really think licenses would have prevented the 737 Max catastrophes?

Im pretty sure EE and AeroE engineers at Boeing have their FE and PEs

737 max was coded to spec. So you are right - we need standards and licenses for managers and executives.

Unfortunately, it's hard to license or standardize integrity. I'd say what we're looking for is "accountability"

Literally all a license is in many cases is just making sure a contractor has insurance and a bond to cover any issues. Getting a license takes less than a day to get And is a matter of filling out a form where I live if you have the insurance in place.

> Unless they each lied about having a contractors' license when asked, they didn't "pose" as anything,

It is often the case, legally, where offering one's services for work requiring a particular license is, absent any explicit disclaimer, a representation that one has the legally-required license.

I get that, and I get the rationale behind it—legally speaking. I still don't think that this makes the preceding statement correct. ("These con men and women...", "...preying on innocent homeowners...")

What really happens is that homeowners (and renters!) don't want to spend too much money on what they consider small projects, and handymen, rather than "preying" on "innocent" customers, are offering simple services for a low price. They're not conning anyone. I'd wager that most of the time everyone knows what's going on.

The statement from HCSO is written as if they consulted the Hyperbole Thesaurus to edit the first draft into something with more "punch".

I mean, I'm sure some subset of this bunch are actual scam artists holding themselves out to be something they're not. But my money is on the majority of them simply getting caught without a license. No need for mug shots and handcuffs and pearl-clutching public statements.

So now it's not only the FBI cultivating terrorists, it's cops cultivating unlicensed professionals. Neat. Can we do this Software as Service style?

> Based on the examples in this article, is there anything that doesn't require a license to do? This is what Libertarians mean when they say regulations make everything cost more.

This is what Libertarians mean when they say regulations make everything cost more / creates a black market.

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